Throughout the production stages of our media piece, we took advantage of the wide range of 'new' media technologies to be found. These greatly helped us throughout these stages in aspects involving both the production of our music video, but also the research and planning stages - for example gaining and analysing audience feedback.
Straight after completing our principal photography, we began to use media technologies such as Adobe's Final Cut Express. Their editing suite was the basis for all aspects of post production of our video, using various editing techniques such as layering imagery, fades, and more complex aspects of editing such as kaleidoscope visionary elements. This greatly helped in us achieving our aim to match the psychedelic genre features and conventions, associated with Pink Floyd, and also the Zeitgeist of that era. The editing stages also greatly helped us achieve the narrative structure and features we hoped to. An example of this is the fade away of the protagonists wife/girlfriend, which clearly emphasises the features of death to the audience visually, reassuring any confusions with the narrative.
The use of social networking was also particularly helpful in both achieving and analysing audience feedback. The use of peer to peer analysis and discussion. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Last.fm were particularly helpful in both understanding audience wants and requirements from the out set, as well as gaining feedback from the completed piece, and if any alterations would be necessary or desirable. This is extremely helpful from a production perspective, as, when producing a piece it is extremely easy to believe that your first idea is developed as far as possible and not aim to work on this. Platforms such as Last.fm and Youtube are also extremely helpful in developing understanding particularly towards target audiences and audience requirements/expectations of both the band, but also the song - in our case 'The Great Gig in the Sky'.
An example of how 'new' media technology, in terms of social networking was used was uploading various clips and sequences of our video onto these sites, such as Facebook. This was particularly helpful in gaining a wide range of critical response from a differing range of people, rather than just a handful or people that could be achieved from viewing the piece on a screen. Therefore it was extremely helpful in gaining, quick, easily, analysable, critical information that could be materialised into a more successful piece with a wider target audience. Once our piece was finished we then uploaded a final draft onto the site in order to gain a large audience perception, and make any corrections or alterations if it was believed these were needed. This therefore lead to us making final changes to our video, in terms of editing and the use of 'green screen' imagery.
Therefore, our combination of both the Blog and our final production suggests how as a group we have successfully used new media, or media 2.0. Using the software as stated above, we have been able to create a successful video using this technology - therefore creating the media content. After doing this we were then able to stream the video back, using both Blogger, but also social networking sites. This then altered our purposes of the video (originally our production was created for entertainment, however, after streaming it back to ourselves the purpose had then altered to the purpose of evaluation.) Therefore, throughout the whole of our production, we have created 'new' media language, then used new media software in order to both show, and evaluate our work.
Other uses of new media technology were also helpful. The website Last.fm was particularly helpful in allowing us to research both the band 'Pink Floyd'; what they stand for, their target audience etcetera, but also the genre conventions, and how best to match these. We aimed to achieve a piece that successfully fulfilled these conventions in order to attract the original target audience, but to also challenge and develop the conventions to appeal to a much newer target audience also. Last.fm was extremely useful in this respect as a large quantity of knowledge surrounding bands and artists can be found there. Myspace, possibly the original social network - surrounds music, especially up and coming bands. This was also particularly helpful in researching both genre conventions, but also researching areas surrounding recent popularity in the music business. Therefore we could continue research onto much more modern music videos and gain knowledge surrounding conventions of popular present day pieces, and what is expected/wanted by audiences of a younger age of Pink Floyd's original audience.
To gain further audience feedback, Youtube's services were particularly helpful. Uploading videos here gains almost immediate viewings from critics and general audience interest, and therefore feedback of the piece. This is particularly helpful, as titling the video with the original song's title gains viewers just wanting to listen to the original piece, and therefore almost accidentally analysing our video. Extremely helpful analysis has come from this, and has allowed us to make any necessary alterations. Due to the comments not being from direct peers, this allows for some extremely, at time disheartening comments. However, this only allowed us to strengthen our piece.
In the creation of our ancillary tasks, Photoshop CS5 extended was extremely helpful. Once again created by Adobe, this allowed any necessary integration with Final Cut extremely easy. Photoshop allowed me to create an image for our CD album artwork that integrated with both our piece, in terms of the location we used, as well as the preconceived ideas that Pink Floyd entail, and also any iconography that they have achieved - for example both the prism logo, and also 'The Wall' typography used in our ancillary tasks. Combining this imagery hopefully made a successfully rounded final piece that remains fresh, whilst still appealing to the 'original' audiences of Pink Floyd due to the iconographic imagery used.
One piece of relatively new media technology we did not take advantage of was the use of cameras that write to solid state SD cards. Though more updated than the camera we chose to use, our choice of camera had much superior sound and video quality to these cameras. Due to the fact we recorded onto DV tape, this also meant we no longer had to spend a large quantity of time uploading videos through the Shareware - MPEG Streamclip; that we felt was unnecessary hassle, and also compressed the images making them a quality even worse than that of the original camera. We felt that using the SD cameras would purely detract from the overall video, as on viewing peers' work, it appeared that their videos had become extremely pixelated and at times distorted due to the sheer amount of compression involved - due to the camcorders instantly creating completed .MOV files from the captured footage. With the DV tape camera, the footage is simply taken at full quality from the camera, and added to final cut in sections sized at the up-loaders discretion, rather than automatically being split into small fragments Therefore, our choice to use possibly outdated, but more towards industrial standard equipment was definitely for the better.
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